


on your way up

by endquestionmark



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-23
Updated: 2015-07-23
Packaged: 2018-04-10 21:04:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4407590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dipper’s been seeing things.</p><p>Normally this wouldn’t bother her — or, no, that isn’t quite right; normally she would make a mental note and see if it happened again — and anyway, it’s finals week. Everyone starts seeing things during finals week.</p>
            </blockquote>





	on your way up

**Author's Note:**

> [@ProBirdRights](https://twitter.com/ProBirdRights/status/600775673477627904): I will chase you Dortito. I will chase you from here to cornternity.
> 
> ...Mindfucking? Everyone human is of age. Everyone not human has no quantifiable age. Heads that are always screaming: [Cat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/indigostohelit), [Emma Jean](http://laydownanywhere.tumblr.com/), and [Tells](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ascanios/pseuds/ascanios). Also mine, but that goes without saying.

Dipper’s been seeing things.

Normally this wouldn’t bother her — or, no, that isn’t quite right; normally she would make a mental note and see if it happened again — and anyway, it’s finals week. Everyone starts seeing things during finals week, though usually it’s things like their bed being a foot left of where it actually is (Dipper’s roommate freshman year, who went face-first into a pile of shoes instead) or the door being open when it isn’t (Dipper, sophomore year, in front of her advisor during a horrifically late registration appointment) or a neon angel bearing glitter and good grades (Mabel, apparently, over Skype, from the other side of the country). The semester’s nearly over, and it’s already snowed twice, and in two weeks she’ll fly home and sleep for a month and endure the same good-natured ribbing as always from a million family members who she only sees twice a year. At worst, it’s the sleep deprivation finally getting to her; at best, if she gets abducted by aliens, at least she won’t have to take the final for the stat requirement she put off for five semesters and would gladly put off for five more.

Anyway, it isn’t that worrying. Sometimes she looks at her laptop and it isn’t there, or there are too many of it, or there is, somehow, too much of it. Laptops aren’t meant to fold in on themselves like that. They aren’t meant to have that many sides.

Dipper rubs her eyes and looks at the time — two in the morning, enough time to get a solid four hours and then maybe fake her own death before tomorrow’s presentation; it isn’t tomorrow until she’s gone to sleep and then woken up — and she goes to close the screen.

It won’t let her.

 _What_ , Dipper thinks, because this is a laptop, not a sarcophagus. (Long story.) She’s not _that_ tired.

The screen goes black.

It isn’t regular dial-down-the-brightness black, either, with the burn-in in the middle of the screen, or the way it looks when it goes to sleep; Dipper’s woken up with keyboard ridges pressed into her face more than once, and this is almost an active black. She goes to increase the screen brightness, and nothing happens; it just gets more aggressively dark, and she remembers fifteen pages of final paper, and she doesn’t panic, exactly, because it’s too early for that, and she ran out of capacity to panic two days ago, but she does her damnedest.

 _HEY_ , the laptop says, and Dipper just thinks, _oh, good, it’s fucking talking_. Finals week doesn’t do anyone any favors. _HEY, KID, WANNA BUY A BRIDGE?_ The webcam light blinks, green, for all the world like an eye.

“Nooooooo,” Dipper says, out loud, because her roommate’s gone for the semester, and if she wants to talk to her laptop at fuck o’clock in the morning, it’s nobody’s business but hers.

 _JUST SAYING,_ her laptop says. _NICE PAPER, BY THE WAY. WOULDN’T IT BE A SHAME IF SOMETHING_ — the swish-rattle of a file landing in the trash — _HAPPENED TO IT?_

“That’s not fair,” Dipper says, which she can afford to do, because after she had to remake a twenty-slide presentation in an hour third semester she developed a three-drive backup system fueled by paranoia and the desire to never be a cautionary tale ever again.

 _FAIR’S FOR CHUMPS!_ the laptop says. _WHO WANTS FAIR?_

“So you won’t mind if I just—” Dipper says, and opens her window — Mabel took the guards off when she visited at the beginning of the semester, so she slides it back until the freezing breeze whips around her, and she wraps one arm around herself and holds the laptop in the other and turns it so that the webcam light is pointing out at three stories’ worth of drop and two days’ worth of stomped-grey snow. The view is washed out, even for late-night. There’s an odd lightness to the quad, as if the contrast has been turned down and the brightness turned up, and Dipper looks at the desaturated sky, and if she wasn’t so tired, she would have a sinking feeling in her chest, but as it is she’s all sinking feeling. She has sunk.

 _NOW LET’S NOT RUSH INTO THINGS,_ the laptop says. _HEY HEY HEY WHOA! LET’S TALK ABOUT THIS_ —

A possessed laptop and a particular brand of inexplicable annoyance that Dipper hasn’t had to think about in, oh, seven years, if she’s being optimistic, and tomorrow she has to pretend that her group helped with this presentation in a concrete sense rather than simply a Facebook chat that she muted two hours after they started breaking out the Business Fish stickers as an alternative method of communication: when Dipper was twelve, it was one thing to commandeer golf carts and break into convenience stores and live a huge adventure. It felt like all the stories that she and Mabel had been reading for years had finally been for something, this massive promise fulfilled.

Dipper isn’t twelve anymore. Mabel’s five states away, and when they call Grunkle Stan on his birthday, he says the same outrageous things and tells them about his plans — “a bear trap adventure! You fall into a pit, and whoever gets out last gets a prize for natural selection” — but Dipper used to see him as a world unto himself, and now she doesn’t. Twelve-year-old Dipper had more important things to worry about than grades, and grad school, and finding a job when she graduates. She had lake monsters and shapeshifters and the end of the world as she knew it. Now Dipper has housing applications and a four-year plan, and it isn’t better or worse, but it’s different. Maybe she’s different.

 _I KNEW I COULD COUNT ON YOU TO BE REASONABLE_ , the laptop says, a little smug. _NOW ABOUT THAT PAPER, MAYBE WE CAN MAKE A—_

Fifteen pages of final paper isn’t worth that much to Dipper, not when she has thirteen of them backed up and emailed to herself for good measure. It’s late. It’s early. Whatever. It’s been a long semester.

 _DEEEEEEEEEEAL_ , the laptop shouts as she lets go, a stretched-out yell as it plummets three stories into a snowdrift. It hisses, and there’s a little puff of smoke, which is a little underwhelming, but that’s fine. It’s finals week. Everyone’s entitled to throw something out a window sooner or later. It’ll be covered over by morning, and then Dipper can give it to some fine arts student who’s sleeping in their studio and desperate for materials.

For a moment, she almost feels disappointed. Is that all there is? Smoke gone on the breeze, and maybe a few sparks, if that wasn’t exhaustion catching up to her; she’d expected more. Dipper isn’t sure whether to be relieved or let down.

She definitely needs those four hours now, though, if she’s thinking like that, and she closes the window and manages to fall into bed on her first try, and doesn’t dream at all.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The presentation goes well. Dipper doesn’t break into interpretative dance, or cross her fingers every time she says “Over to you, Chad,” and the backup file is not only workable but more than her group deserves, considering the variety of useless information they’d sent her hours after she’d asked for it. She has the afternoon off, then and she goes to the library and ignores the sticky keyboard and pounds out the two pages of paper she lost with her laptop, and then another three, because she’s on a roll, as long as she doesn’t have to read or explain anything she’s written in the last three days. The dining hall looks like the final scenes out of some Agatha Christie novel, and Dipper half-expects the serving lady to throw her ladle in the air and scream, “I did it! It was me! I’m the reason your professor changed the assignment two weeks after giving it and a week before it was due! It was me and I don’t regret it!”

It’s possible that she should be sleeping more.

Anyway, Dipper has eighteen pages of a twenty-page paper due tomorrow, and the library is open all night, and she still hasn’t dug her laptop out of the snow, so she goes back to the library, and puts a sticky note over the clip-on webcam, and digs her heels in. Whatever momentum she had earlier in the day is well and truly lost, and she gets stuck mid-sentence and can’t remember what she was saying, or whether her fingers were just typing on autopilot and now that she’s engaged her brain the rest of the idea is lost forever. She feels like her head has been filled with liquid resin, and if she moves too quickly it’ll fall off, and who asks for Chicago-style footnotes anyway? Why isn’t APA good enough? One page down, one to go, and Dipper doesn’t want to sleep on it, because if she feels like this in the morning, she honestly might go and lie down in the snow until she’s lost a finger or two and has a good excuse for asking for an extension. It isn’t a good thought, but it’s not a surprising one, and she shakes her head and saves the document, shoves her thumb drive in her hoodie pocket. A walk will help, probably, and if it doesn’t, there’s always hypothermia.

Outside, she follows the path around the library, back to the north lawn, and then the dorm buildings, rows of lit windows, and puts one foot in front of the other, pushing through the exhaustion and the nausea and probably the buildup of caffeine and regret. It’s a stupid thing to get like this over, a final paper; Dipper learned earlier than most that there are rarely easy shortcuts, and to read the fine print, and all she has to do is go back in and sit down and write a page — one page, and the citations will take care of themselves — and that, right now, seems like something that she is just not capable of doing.

She groans out loud, and pinches the bridge of her nose, and looks up at the waning half-moon.

It smiles at her.

 _HEY, PINETREE,_ it says. _LONG TIME_.

“I was fine with no see,” Dipper says. “I _liked_ no see.”

 _SPEAK FOR YOURSELF,_ the moon says, and the clouds twist, circle around it, like a slitted eye looking through thumb and forefinger. _HEY, HERE’S A JOKE: HOW IS AN EYE LIKE A DEAD BABY?_

“Forget this,” Dipper says. This isn’t helping. She came outside to clear her head. She wanted fresh air, not cryptic creepiness.

 _YOU ONLY NOTICE IT WHEN IT STARTS SCREAMING,_ the moon says. _DIDJA LIKE THAT? I CAME UP WITH IT MYSELF_.

“You’re _gone_ ,” Dipper says, and regrets it immediately. “You’re not meant to be able to _do_ this.” She gestures at the moon in the static buzz of the sky. “We—”

 _BEAT ME?_ the moon says. _DIDN’T READ THAT JOURNAL AS WELL AS YOU SHOULD HAVE._ It tsks at her, and the ground ripples. The trees shake. She throws her arms out for balance. _GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. HEY, THAT’S A GOOD ONE. I’M GOING TO REMEMBER IT_.

“Trust me,” Dipper says. “I’m working on it.”

 _UH HUH_ , the moon says. _YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT INVITATIONS, RIGHT? NO TAKEBACKS. THAT WOULD BE RUDE_. It looms, pitted and pulsing. Dipper could leave her handprint in a crater if she wanted to.

“What, you want it in writing?” Dipper says. “I’ll write it out and sign it, right here.” She gestures at the snow. “Sign and date it.”

 _AND NOT EVEN DINNER FIRST_ , the moon says. _WHAT KIND OF DEMON DO YOU THINK I AM?_

Suddenly, Dipper is tired. She hasn’t let herself think about it for days, because if she does, she might cry, and if she cries, she might never stop, and that’s not a good enough reason to ask for an extension “Write my paper or fuck off,” she says.

 _NOW THERE’S A PROPOSITION I COULD BE INTERESTED IN,_ the moon — Bill, all right, Bill; she’s been putting off naming him, because names have power, even abbreviations and nicknames, but she’s tired, and the moon is a rock, and rocks don’t talk — says, and she can feel the interest coming off of him, suddenly. _WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?_

“I’ll tell you a fucking story,” Dipper says. “Oh, wait, what about I kick your ass all the way back to the dreamscape again?”

 _NICE TRY,_ Bill says. _A STORY, HUH? CAN IT BE ABOUT HOW YOU BROKE THAT TOWEL RAIL WHEN YOU WERE SIX? WAIT. WHAT ABOUT THAT TIME THAT YOU FELL OUT OF A TREE AND BROKE YOUR ANKLE? I LIKE THAT ONE. ALL SNAP CRUNCH._

So Bill’s been in her head, and still is; so Bill’s riffled through her memories like a bored toddler, looking for the bits with screaming and bright colors. She shouldn’t be as blasé about it as she is, but between the ghosts and the ghouls, Dipper’s gotten a little too used to this kind of thing. “No deal,” she says. Just because he’s seen through her eyes doesn’t mean he knows how she’d see things. Under the memories and the stories there’s still something else, something that’s just her, and nobody can take that, or borrow it, or tip it down the stairs for fun. “Caps lock doesn’t really work for final papers.”

 _HOW ABOUT A WAKE-UP CALL, THEN?_ Bill says. _HOW ABOUT_ —

Everything is screaming. Dipper looks at the sky, and it screeches feedback at her; the black trees rattle, and stretch, and tear like putty. The snow hisses like an acid bath, boiling at her ankles, and behind her the library lurches like a puppet put together wrong, groaning in agony, and her shadows flicker, and when she looks at her hands, they’re glitching, coruscating colors that she can’t name, and can’t unsee—

— _THAT?_

Her hands are steady, and the snow around her feet is crisp and just starting to melt. The color is back in the lamps, and down the path a blue bulb glows over the emergency phone.

It’s cold out, but clear; the little high cloud that she can see is skidding through the sky.

Dipper feels more awake than she has in months.

She goes back inside.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Dipper finishes the paper at four in the morning. The last page takes her two hours, but she doesn’t mind. Maybe it’s that she’s just so tired that she no longer has any sense of self-preservation, or maybe it’s that watching her hands fluoresce like so much neon has helped put things into perspective, but she almost enjoys writing the conclusion, though she can’t for the life of her remember a single word of it, besides “the”. She’s pretty sure that she said “the” once or twice, and maybe there’s a comma or two that she’d stand by.

She has to print it three times, because the first time it comes out in Wingdings, her name neatly replaced by triangles, and the date also replaced by triangles, and honestly most things at least somewhat triangular, but Dipper doesn’t even bother to kick the printer. She just goes and queues it up again twice, just in case, and takes a quiet satisfaction in the fact that Bill’s probably being forced to read seventy pages about critical praxis and hegemony something about two hundred times in the interim, based on the hysterical sobbing coming from the next cubicle over.

She steals a stapler from the security guard’s desk, and double-checks the page numbers and the footnotes, and then Dipper practically dances out into the snow, so tired that she can’t feel the tips of her fingers and nearly walks into a tree, and gets the most syrupy, three sugars and caramel on top latte that she can think of from the dead-eyed barista working the graveyard shift at the campus Starbucks knockoff. If she’s sharing headspace with Bill, she may as well indulge herself, because she’s practically immune to the side effects of a gallon of artificial caramel, but he has yet to voluntarily ingest the actual rubber sealant of flavors, and she can’t wait.

About an hour into waiting for the building to open so that she can slam-dunk her paper into her professor’s mailbox, the world goes grey — well, greyer than usual; at this point even she has to admit that it’s probably sleep deprivation and not possession — and she looks around for the barista to start glowing yellow, or for the sandwiches to start talking, but instead it’s just Bill, hanging a foot outside the window, hands clasped behind himself, leaning in like a visitor at the zoo.

“Not bad,” he says, and Dipper files that away for later: it’s been years, and she still recognizes the difference between his voice when he’s constrained to — _him_ , not that that’s any less worrying — a limited form, anyway, and when he’s being the moon, or the world, or whatever’s taking his fancy at the moment. A screaming head. A mirror. Once, horribly, the manifestation of pain. “Didn’t think you’d pull it off, Pinetree.”

“That was always your problem,” she says, and slurps her latte with barely-restrained glee.

“You deserve a prize,” Bill says, a little sourly, and spreads his hands, and Dipper raises a finger.

“How’s that hindbrain possession going?” she says. “What if I went and got some, I don’t know, Nine Inch Nails stuck in my head?”

“You wouldn’t,” Bill says. “Then you’d have Nine Inch Nails stuck in your head, and not the fun type.” He lowers his hands, though, and she shrugs.

“I’m willing to make that sacrifice,” she says.

“Irrational,” Bill says. “I _like_ it.”

“Or,” Dipper says, “I could go and wrap myself in a nice warm blanket and listen to elevator music until I fall asleep. Nice and comfortable. How’s that?”

“I was hoping you’d slam your hand in a door first,” Bill says. “Ooh, or maybe — look, okay, you know the blender in the kitchen? Hear me out, we can make this work.”

Dipper needs to not think about that blender ever, ever again, and she needs to have all her internal organs replaced before the espresso buildup makes her kidneys explode. “Now you’re talking,” Bill says. “Pop! Splat! That’s more like it.”

“Warm blanket,” Dipper mutters to herself, and looks at the clock again. It’ll take her ten minutes to get across campus, fifteen if she avoids trees, and her coffee’s cooled down enough that she can actually taste what she’s drinking.

“Okay, okay!” Bill says. “Sheesh. Be like that.”

He fades slowly, sucking at the edges of Dipper’s vision, and when he’s gone, she blinks away the afterimage of a triangle, somehow more real than the landscape behind him.

Mailbox. Blanket. One step at a time.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Get some sleep,” the security guard had recommended, when Dipper had stumbled down the stairs, paperless and victorious, and Dipper’s going to do that, she will, but she feels like she’s been coated in potato particles and poor life choices in the dining hall, as well as general eau de desperate student, and if she doesn’t get it off, she’s going to have to burn her bedsheets, and maybe the entire building, just to make a clean start of it. She finds her cleanest towel, if you ignore the grey smudges of eyeliner in the corner, and wishes that she had sandpaper too, to scrape off a layer of skin, and settles for the fancy shower gel that her aunt gives her every year for her birthday “for special occasions!” and stumbles down the hallway.

The bathroom is empty, because it’s nine in the morning, and everyone in the building is either dead or performing complex resurrection rituals including caffeine pills and five-hour energy to override their failing organs and drag themselves upright for another few hours. That means that hot water is plentiful, and Dipper can open the window a crack for the temperature contrast of the icy breeze, and nobody is going to come in halfway through and clear their throat at her until she acknowledges them and adheres to anything like a reasonable schedule.

She stares at herself in the mirror. Same eyes as always, and where Mabel still keeps her hair long, lets it frame her face, Dipper had cut hers short, choppy ends brushing her ears. It isn’t a flattering cut, and she doesn’t really mind; it saves her time and anyway, that was never her role. Mabel’s always been the one with the bright colors and statement jewelry and the overwhelming enthusiasm, and Dipper still wears down vests and doesn’t really care what cut her jeans are. It means that people look at them differently, but they have the same smile, when Mabel’s being subdued and Dipper’s being particularly ebullient, and sometimes Dipper thinks that it would be easier, to wear dresses and sparkle, but that’s okay. She likes her clothes. It’s not her problem.

Anyway, she turns the water up hot, and picks at the shower gel’s seal until it comes off, and when the stall is full of steam she steps in and gasps at the shock of it. It feels so luxurious, to let her mental checklist lapse for a while, without needing to compartmentalize, just think about whether she wants to eat dinner today or just sleep through until tomorrow and then decimate the dining hall at brunch. She scrubs her neck, and down her shoulders, and wishes that they made tea-scented shower gel, and files that for later, too, and then she turns the heat down a little, hand low on her belly, humming and content, and thinks, hey, why not?

There are a lot of reasons why not. First of all, she might be so tired that she’ll slip and knock herself out, and she really doesn’t feel like becoming a cautionary tale in that regard; second of all, she isn’t the only one in her head, apparently, or at least hanging out in this body, and that’s more than she really wants to think about. Dipper considers just not thinking about it, and hoping that Bill doesn’t turn up halfway through, which she immediately dismisses as unlikely and self-deluding, and then she considers not thinking about it, which is a lost cause.

She thinks about thinking about it.

“You know I can hear you, right?” Bill says, or doesn’t say, because she can’t see him, but she can hear him, and the edges of her vision blur yellow. Yellowish. It isn’t a real color, not in a way that she can describe, but if it were: yellow. “I’m just saying, you’re not exactly whispering here — hey!”

Fuck it. Fuck it. Dipper isn’t putting her life on hold because a million years ago she made a shitty decision over a laptop password. She runs her hand up her ribs, cups herself, runs her thumb over her nipple, and the breeze just makes it better, if she leans just so, and the yellow flares and flickers. “Eat shit,” Dipper says, aloud, and grins. This, she’s good at; there’s a lot of things out there that she doesn’t know, but she knows her body, knows that she likes to be teased until she’s arching into it, and then likes fingernails, hard, and Bill probably knows that too, and knows what it feels like, in her body, but he doesn’t know how she feels it, and it had been enough of a shock to Dipper when she found out, so. His head will probably come off. Metaphorically.

“Hey,” Bill tries to say again, but the word crackles. _Sorry_ , Dipper thinks, _You’re breaking up, Dipper’s going through a tunnel_ , and then she bursts out laughing, because that’s terrible. It’s embarrassingly terrible, but Bill sounds like dial-up with the reverb turned up filtered through heavy metal and, possibly, hell, and she slicks her fingers between her legs, slow at first, and basks in it. Petty triumph. She loves it.

When she speeds up, her vision starts to strobe, a little, just when she tries to focus — the shower curtain, the windowsill, the temperature control — and Dipper closes her eyes, lets her other hand drift down her body, fingertips light, and presses two fingers into herself. Usually she likes to start a little slower, but this isn’t about her, or maybe it is; it’s deliberate in a way that she usually isn’t, like a dare. She likes it. Usually it’s about getting it over and done with, one orgasm down so that she can relax into another, or get some sleep, or focus on a project, but she’s tired, and goal-oriented, and there are fractals, now, behind her eyes, that she shouldn’t be able to see. They’re warping as she watches, budding at the edges, and she gasps, and doesn’t know if it’s at the lines of them or her fingers on her clit, the way she’s tense now, braced.

Both, probably; both, because when she lets her head fall back, she doesn’t open her eyes, but it’s as if her skull splits open anyway. There is more in her head than she can quantify, and none of it is describable. The universe is, and it pours into her, and Dipper thinks that she’s going to drown, be swept away like a speck of dust on the starry tide. There’s static in her ears, like a very old record, or an echo, billions of years old, and then before that, and then the future. She feels like the only thing that’s real, everything that ever has been or is or will be, and beyond that, everything that might, and all of it just half a degree off from what it could be, and she rocks forward, gasps, and comes, snapping back into herself like the worst whiplash that she can’t describe, every thought suddenly infinitesimal for a moment before she opens her eyes.

Shower curtain, scrubs-green; jasmine shower gel; steam on the walls and the window: nothing’s changed, except that whoever’s in the next room over is awake now, and unhappy about it. The breeze makes Dipper shiver. She can still see something out of the corner of her eye, like burn-in, or the way that old photos bubble and curl at the edges in a fire, but it’s like the spots she gets when she stares at the sun. It’s a nuisance, but it’ll pass, or she’ll suffer through it, but it isn’t anyone else’s problem, and Dipper thinks that she can deal with this. She can be a person who can deal with this, wake up and know what she’s facing, or take it out of the world with her, if it comes to that.

She feels good. She feels tired.

Dipper pulls the window closed and turns off the water, and wipes enough of the steam from the mirror that she can see herself — same eyes, same dark circles, a little pink from the shower — and smiles, and lets the mirror fog over again, and lets the door swing behind her, and doesn’t mind if she dreams or not.


End file.
